Playwright Sam
Shepard doesn’t. As redemptive as Austin finds the aroma—and the toast,
prepared onstage in eight gleaming toasters, certainly smells like hot,
buttery comfort—True West is true Shepard, which means there’s no
easy deliverance at hand. The 1980 play is a simultaneously
claustrophobic and sprawling character study of two brothers, Austin
(Kenneth Baldino) and his older brother, Lee (Matthew DiBiasio), a
Busch-swigging, sticky-fingered vagabond in a sweat-stained T-shirt and
cowboy boots. The actors couldn’t be more physically different: The
rangy DiBiasio hops onto the kitchen counter, spreading his legs wide,
eyes bulging in ways alternately dazed and crazed. Baldino, meanwhile,
slight and fine-featured, clutches his knees together at the table,
cowering before his sibling. The action takes place in suburban L.A.,
where Austin is living at their mother’s house and laboring on the Great
American Screenplay. When Lee shows up unannounced—and with a movie
idea of his own—the brothers lurch from fruitful cooperation to jealous
squabbling, from painful reminiscence to corrosive cruelty.

Director Devon Allen plays up True West’s
dark undercurrents. That’s not to say she forgoes Shepard’s prickly
comedy: Austin looks lovingly at his gaggle of stolen toasters as if
preparing to read them a bedtime story. But the production acknowledges
the play’s thematically expansive nature, as well as its fundamentally
claustrophobic environs. For Shepard, as for Frederick Jackson Turner
nearly a century before him, the West is closed, the myth of
ever-unfolding grandeur and endless opportunity gone. Lee talks of
running off to the Mojave, but instead the brothers sit in the kitchen,
getting drunk on Jack Daniel’s and lunging at one another.

The staging, too, is
nimble. Actors change costumes onstage and move about the props
themselves, lending the production a lived-in feel. At times, you can
see the actors acting, and they telegraph the play’s more volatile
moments. But there are moments when the performance seizes you, as when
Austin tenderly and funnily recalls how their father lost all his teeth,
and then his dentures. Or, of course, when the theater fills with the
smell of warm toast.